A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition
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This important book is the first full-scale account of male gay literature across cultures, languages, and centuries. A work of reference as well as the definitive history of a tradition, it traces writing by and about homosexual men from ancient Greece and Rome to the twentieth-century gay literary explosion.Publishers WeeklyWoods's (Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-Eroticism and Modern Poetry) dense but rewarding history has a lofty aim: "queering the canon." Starting with the man-boy love of Greek classics, this academic text focuses on homoeroticism in the literary imagination. But Woods does more. By analyzing attitudes about homosexual men, he looks at the homophobic ideologies that poetry and prose have encouraged throughout history. While there is not enough information on the role of religion in classifying sodomy as sin, Woods demonstrates that as early as the 12th century, hostility against man-to-man love was evident. But despite the linking of homosexual love with shame and repentance, it formed a culturedescribed by writers as diverse as Aristophanes, Rumi, William Shakespeare, the Marquis de Sade, Walt Whitman, Federico Garca Lorca, Langston Hughes and Jane Austenthat held on. Woods's commentary about the Nazis and about the popular postwar belief that fascism developed because of Germany's tolerance of "sexual perversion" is eye-opening, as is his deconstruction of 1950s crime fiction, which routinely depicted gay men as deviants. Woods moves his readers into the decades since Stonewall and scrutinizes writing that deals with gay pride as well as AIDS. Throughout, his point that homoerotic traditions are a literary constant is well-taken and persuasively argued. Woods makes inroads in defining queer culture and illuminates the essential role gay men have played in the Western canon. (Mar.)
Acknowledgements1The Making of the Gay Tradition12The Greek Classics173The Roman Classics324The Christian Middle Ages415The Orient536The European Renaissance687Christopher Marlowe848William Shakespeare939The Pastoral Elegists10810From Libertinism to the Gothic12411New Bearings in the Novel13612The American Renaissance15113Muscular Aestheticism16714Spirit Versus Physique18115Marcel Proust19216Homosexual Men by Women20117The Harlem Renaissance20918The Tragic Sense of Life21719Fantastic Realism22620Towards the Popular23721The Pink Triangle24722The Post-War Starting-Point25723European Poetry on the Left26724Post-War Tragic Fiction27525The Homosexual in Society28926Black African Poetry30227From Solitary Vice to Circle Jerk31328Boys and Boyhood32129The Age of Antibiotics33630The Family and Its Alternatives34431The AIDS Epidemic35932Poetry and Paradox375Notes390Bibliography421Illustration Credits446Index447
